Bright Light
by elliottskullboy
Summary: Set in book 11 'Last Breath' where Claire dies she is brought back alive but as a vampire, will Shane rejects her and what will happen between her and Myrnin and what will happen to Amelie. Will they save the town?


**Bright lights **

**Chapter one **

_Claire could feel Hiram out there, testing the walls, looking for weaknesses. It felt exactly like being in a glass-walled shark tank while the great white prowled around waiting for lunch. The house itself was protecting her—she knew that—but it was conflicted. Hiram was there first, after all. And Hiram at least thought he was in charge._

_**I can't stay here**__, she thought. She had no idea how much time had passed. This room was strange that way; it felt frozen, as if time didn't really affect it . . . or passed much more slowly than in other places. That was possible, of course; quantum physics allowed for the possibility that time was variable, but that was usually at the subatomic level, not in the visible world... Interesting problem, though. Maybe it had something to do with the way the portals worked, also at the subatomic level._

_And I'm distracting myself with physics. Well, some people recited baseball scores or movie lines; physics was a perfectly valid hobby. Besides, if she got really desperate, she could recite the periodic tables._

_I can't spend the rest of my—eternity sitting on my ghostly butt up here. Alone._

_But she didn't dare try to leave, either._

_A ripple of raw power suddenly ran through the house. It was so strong that it seemed to break everything apart into jagged, glittering, spinning pieces—the furniture, the room, the house. It all flew apart in a sudden, confusing explosion, turning and falling and rising all at once._

_And then she felt the pull._

_It wasn't like she'd felt when she'd gone through the portal—that had been a kind of pull, too, but it was as if she'd been anchored and had to unravel herself into strings to move away. This felt more as if she were being pressed together, and a great, vast vacuum was dragging her away into the unknown._

_Claire screamed and flailed, trying to grab onto something, anything, but it was all shattered, all cutting edges and confusion—_

_And then something seized her in powerful hands._

_Hiram Glass._

_He was still mostly whole, but there were pieces coming off him, bits chipping away and flying into the darkness. "You!" he shouted, and bared his teeth at her, right in her face. "You vandal! You've destroyed everything!"_

"_No, I didn't—" He wasn't listening. That mouth opened, impossibly wide, and Claire knew he was going to bite her and rip her apart before the dark could take her..._

_With the strength of desperation and panic, Claire pushed, as hard as she could._

_And broke his hold._

_Hiram looked comically surprised as his hands slipped free, and he spun off into the black void, screaming as he broke apart into tiny, glittering pieces._

_Gone._

_**I'll be next**__, Claire thought. She was weirdly calm. There was no way she could resist that pull. It was like a black hole, and she was standing on the event horizon._

_**Claire.**_

_It was a whisper in the hurricane that roared around her, but she recognized the sound. Myrnin. That was Myrnin's voice._

"_Here!" she screamed, as the void pulled her away. "Myrnin, help me! Help!"_

_The spinning pieces of reality around her seemed to slow down. She saw herself reflected in one side of a jagged shard, and then it turned, and she saw Myrnin's face in it. He looked worried, and there were lines of effort around his mouth that she'd never seen before._

_His hand reached out to her, but it was as if he was trapped behind the glass; his hand slapped against it, and then the spinning shard turned again, and she lost him._

_Claire twisted. There, in another piece, she saw him again, reaching out._

_**Take it;**__ he was trying to tell her. It wasn't a voice—it was something else, a kind of whisper moving inside her, like blood in her veins. Only she no longer had blood, or veins. This was coming out of her very core, the thing that had survived her body._

_Her soul._

_**Take my hand.**_

_She couldn't. He was on the other side of that glass, and the pieces were moving, and she was being dragged inch by inch into the dark._

_Then she saw Shane in one of the spinning, glittering shards. He was on his back, propped up, staring out of the shred of reality, and he looked so agonizingly alone._

_**Take my hand, Claire—do it now!**__ Myrnin's whisper sounded desperate now. Anguished. This was hurting him, too._

_She kept her gaze on Shane's face, but she lunged for Myrnin's hand as another piece of reality slid past her._

_Her fingers broke through the cold, icy surface, and touched his._

_And reality came back together. She could still see the cracks, hear the awful noise of the darkness beyond that, but Myrnin's hand twisted and closed around her wrist in an unbreakable hold, and she fell, and fell, and fell..._

_And took a breath._

_A real breath._

_It hurt._

_Her first thought was this can't happen, and the second was blotted out by a wave of pain so intense that she wanted to vomit, but couldn't. She couldn't move. The pain was in her neck, and she remembered the terrible snap, the darkness, the moment when everything had . . ._

_**I'm not breathing**__, she thought. __**How can I not be breathing? I can't feel my heart beating. But I can feel . . .**_

_**I can feel.**_

_The pain was fading now, but there was something else, something almost worse . . . something moving through her veins, like an ice-cold poison. Like death, but slower. Relentless._

_She felt freezing hands on her forehead, and Myrnin's voice was inside her head, inside._

_**You have to choose,**__ he told her. __**If you want to live as you did before, you must fight. This is your choice. I brought you back, but now you must choose.**_

_She was confused, and scared, and hurting. __**Choose what?**_

_**Human life,**__ he said. __**Or the endless possibilities I have to offer. But you can't change your mind once you've made that choice.**_

_Having Myrnin in her head was like being Alice down the rabbit hole. He sounded sane enough, but in the background rushed images, feelings, an utterly mad jittering landscape of too much colour, too much pain, __too much love__, too much hunger, too much everything. This was what Myrnin was._

_And he scared her, and charmed her, and made her want to cry._

_The ice in her veins had something wonderful about it, because it felt like peace. Like stillness. Not like death, but with something of death in it, and something of life. It had the fierce, sharp clarity of eternity._

_Her heart was struggling to keep beating against it, and the struggle hurt. Life hurt. Everything about it brought pain, even the best things._

_**Then let go**__, Myrnin whispered. __**I'll catch you. But understand—you have to let go of everything when you fall. Even him.**_

_Shane._

_There was something about the uneven beat of her heart that reminded Claire of him—of the way he fought, every day, against something, even if it was only himself. Of the way he went still and peaceful when they were lying in bed together, on the edge of sleep. Of the taste of his kiss and the way he smiled at her and the way he had dared her to live._

_There was cold, rational survival in the ice running through her body, and an end to pain, but Myrnin had reminded her of something else, too: that pain was life._

_It was just Shane that was pulling her back. It wasn't Eve, and Michael, and her parents; it wasn't Richard and Hannah and so many others, not even Monica, because in the end, they may have shared experience in her life but that wasn't enough or was it? _

_There was so much more to learn._

_She did it, in the end, for herself. For her own distant, uncertain future._

_The cold intensified, but her body was a prison, and she couldn't move it . . . and then she took the cold feeling it started spreading through her body making her feel more at peace with herself. _

_Myrnin's whisper said, __**Good girl**__, and she felt his happiness and love, but then it was all gone, like the cobwebs of a dream swept away by a morning breeze._

_And she opened her eyes and said, "Wow." _

For my first new words in my new life it didn't seem that inspirational. Eve shrieks loudly with my new hearing it was painful but I was glad she was happy to see me. But Shane staggered back like someone had pushed him or pulled him away from me but I didn't seem to care I realised that my feelings for Shane were nothing more than a childish attempt at romance.

I noticed Myrnin he fell on to the floor, he seemed weak as he had brought me back from the dead I was glad all of this made me realise why Shane was always jealous of me hanging around Myrnin, we had a chemistry you couldn't mistake but I had. It took death to make me realise what was right in front of me. I got off of the sofa going to Myrnin he seemed hesitant at first scared maybe of what Shane would do but I didn't care. Eve seemed to understand what I had, she helped Shane up from where he was and I helped Myrnin he seemed unsteady so I looked at Eve then said, "Eve get some blood for us will you I think Michael still has some in the fridge I'd do it quickly I don't feel to good and I'm more worried about Myrnin." She nodded her head understanding then went out into the kitchen I could still hear her looking in the fridge. That distracted me from Shane he had suddenly started running at me and Myrnin he had a stake in his hand, I was terrified he was going to take Myrnin away from me I pushed Myrnin out of the way of the aim I then kicked Shane in the stomach sending him flying into Michael's chair, he seemed surprised by my actions but I was hungry for blood I didn't need the smell right now. Myrnin took me into his arms he seemed better now then Eve came into the room with two warm bottles of blood she handed them to us, we took them and started drinking. The taste of the blood running down my throat felt wonderful like I was meant to be like this and I hoped that I could feel this good after we saved the town.


End file.
